Microsoft tries to guess your age with a new website and face detection API

Microsoft recently launched a new face detection API to developers, but it also came up with a rather cool demo for anyone to test out. It's a website called How-Old.net that attempts to predict the age and gender of a person just by scanning a picture.

Microsoft combined a number of its products and services, including Bing and Azure, to create the website. It stated:

"We wanted to create an experience that was intelligent and fun could capture the attention of people globally, so we looked at the APIs available in the Azure Machine Learning Gallery. The gallery contains many finished intelligent services such as Face, Speech, and Vision which are part of a new suite called Project Oxford from Bing and Microsoft Research. The Face API has a demo page that uses the API to detect and extract information about faces in a photograph. We found the ability of the face API to estimate age and gender to be particularly interesting and chose this aspect of it for our project."

The site not only allow people to upload their own pictures to be scanned, it also allows them to use photos found in a search powered by Bing. The final result is, well, interesting but not necessarily accurate. Our own Derek Kessler is still a young and spry 28 years old but How-Old.net has labeled him as 41 years old when we uploaded a recent photo of him.

Microsoft says that it is striving to improve the new face detection API, so hopefully How-Old.net will offer more precise predictions over the next several months. Microsoft is adding in face detection as one of its new Windows Hello security features in Windows 10.

Okay, so obviously, we have all been mislead to believing something else, here. This is about how old do we look, it's not trying to guess our actual age. I can accept that I do look like 28 sometimes. Maybe 31 for some people but that's a stretch.

I saw this working at Microsoft UK using cameras and displaying the ages of the faces on a large tv. It was much more accurate than people are suggesting in these comments so I guess a 2d photo is more limiting

A picture of me right now was correct in female, but guessed 7 years older. Not bad. A picture where my head was smaller said female and 25 years older. Hmmm. My favorite though was the picture where I was wearing a long fake mustache - it said I was a 71 year old man! Good to know that my mustache disguise is spot on.

Closest it got to my age was 2 years above, furthest it got was 16 years above. Shaving definitely makes it read as younger, my younger ages were clean shaven or light stubble, my oldest ages were with full on beard

It showed me to be 8 years older than I am, but it got my 5 year old daughter correct. Still needs work, but really cool concept. I'm sure it will improve over time. Most people guess my age at 15 years younger than I actually am.

I notice it doesn't select "hair" to judge by gray hair. That's good, because so many people dye it. Not an indicator, though many people "percieve" someone's age incorrectly by the amount of gray they have.

To actually try it out. This won't work through my browser on my 1020. I may waste some downtime trying this on my phone at work. I'd spend the two minutes to download the app. But I'm not going to waste my time at home, on my desktop doing this. So yeah, an app would be nice.

Not so cool. I tried 3 images, my age is 18 but results are 33, 27, 29! Mine gender was correct, but for one of my friend age and gender both were wrong! Lol the site considered him to be a 21 year old girl!

Works perfectly, NIST.....
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This is great for AI.... So, in the future robots will be able determine my age, race, gender... So, they can respect, and disrespect, me accordingly... COOL❗❗❗
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Hey, maybe XBM will be able to detect that I'm black, and suggest some nice hip hop music❓❓ LOL. Discrimination. Awesome❗❗ Can't wait.